I have been working for over a week to get qmail working on gentoo 1.4.10 sparc64. I have built and used qmail before without issues on linux/intel and solaris/sparc, so I am familiar with qmail quirks but this one is really getting me.

Originally, I emerge'd qmail and configured it using the setup I had on the same server when it was running solaris. No dice. although it would listen on 25 and accept email for the appropriate domains, it would never deliver any mail. Neither to ~/Maildir nor to the gentoo preferred ~/.maildir

Ok, I figured maybe there was something specific about the build, so I looked around for some documentation. After finding a couple walkthroughs, I removed qmail with "emerge -C qmail" and deleted the stale config files, logs, etc. Then I followed the instructions here:

and no dice. So, I removed qmail again, emerge'd and custom tweaked every parameter I know of and when it failed I emerge'd maildrop to use as the local mail delivery mechanism. Still no dice.

Before you ask, the queues have been setup properly by queue-fix, I have tried numerous perturbations of setups (abbreviated above), the home directories are accessible and in some cases were even set to 777 for debugging, I have tried explicitly setting users up in the /var/qmail/users/assign file *and* allowing default delivery, I altered the defaultdelivery mechanism to use ~/Maildir, ~/.maildir and maildrop, I have manually configured qmail with and without ssl, and using the /var/db/pkg/qmail... ebuild config. But none of the above have worked. I cannot find any errors in the qmail logs, nor can I find any badmail or bounced messages anywhere on the system.

Is there something wrong with the sparc32/64 portage of qmail ? Has anybody else had similar problems?

Any tips, pointers, or way I can find where these messages have gone would be great - I can't find anything wrong (other than that the mail never gets delivered).

First, make sure you don't still have another SMTP server, such as sendmail or ssmtp, still present on your server. If you do, it may be attaching itself to port 25, preventing qmail from doing so.

Barring that, remember that "Logs Are Your Friends." Have a look at the log files in the /var/log/qmail directories, particularly the logs in /var/log/qmail/qmail-send. Any message that qmail processes, whether successfully delivered or not, will have a record of where it went and why.

If in doubt, post the logs generated by your failed message deliveries here._________________Proud to be a... eh, forget it.

I actually have qmail currently (well mostly) working on sparc64 (Ultra5). I can send and receive mail most of the time. I do however every once in a while get a bounce message:

Code:

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mymail.server.tld.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

Interestingly enough, sometimes I get the invalid pointer message in my log files even when the messages is sent. As well , if the message gets bounced, most of the time all I have to do is resend it and all is well (except for the invalid_pointer message in the logs).